well, fulbright tries to limit contact between prospective students and departments while the application process is underway. i think it's more for their own ability to control what's going on - what happens for us foreign fulbrighters is that fulbright/IIE does the applications for us so they are the ones who get contacted once a decision is made. fulbright works essentially as an exchange program, so they are actually 'placing' foreign students at american universities, and want to control the process. the problem with this is that it's done through their NYC offices, which probably deal with thousands of applications each session, which means sometimes they also take a bit of time in forwarding the info on to the students. but because fulbright (at least in europe) also offers a stipend of 25k in the first year and 12k in the second year, they are also interested in negotiating financial packages and insurance, etc. directly with universities. this means that not only am i not really allowed to contact the departments directly until more results come in and i make a final decision, but i don't even have the usernames and passwords to access my own applications! ugh.
as for housing, yeah, i was looking at the grad apartments too - they looked okay actually. i did my undergrad and MA studies in the UK and am used to much lower standards of student housing! did you check out the yale properties? they looked gorgeous but far too pricey for me.
when will you be visiting? if i end up going it'll probably be late march and i'll try and couchsurf to keep costs low and meet folks.
oh, and on your previous comment: yes! getting into yale has felt pretty unreal. i honestly never thought i could do it (i've been developing plan B the past few weeks) and still read my acceptance letter daily to make sure i'm not crazy. but now, impostor syndrome is settling in, and i'm a little obsessed about reading as much as possible before september so i don't feel like a complete freak.